Australian Farm Extension Work On Big Scale

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29803, 21 April 1962, Page 7

Australian Farm Extension Work On Big Scale

The passing on of information to the farmer, or agricultural extension, is a big business in New South Wales. To serve the State’s 77,000-odd farmers, the State Department of Agriculture has divided the area into nine regions with some 352 extension workers including office staff, with each region in charge of an experienced extension officer.

To encourage expansion of agricultural production to feed the country’s growing population and also keep exports up, the Commonwealth Government makes £ 142,000.

a year available to the New South Wales Government for agricultural extension. Some of this money is specially ear-marked for helping the dairy industry. To help them in their work, extension workers in the State have some 24 motor vehicles, 140 cameras, 50 film projectors, and 50 tape recorders. Field days and farm schools or conventions are a vital means of passing on information, and here the department has a close liaison with farmers through the 300-odd branches of the Agricultural Bureau in the State. The bureau is a non-political farmers’ organisation with education one of its main features and its organisers are members of the staff of the State Department of Agriculture. In each region the department has a journalist and each region has about two hours’ free time on the radio a week. A special officer is employed to teach staff howbest to use the radio. Now television is about to become a medium of spreading agricultural information. The Director-General of the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, Dr. Graham Edgar, said this week that his department was going to have to move into

commercial television, which was now beginning to operate in rural areas. He said that weekly programmes were being sought and he had laid down that no departmental programmes should be used to advance the cause of any product being advertised. To this end it was proposed that advertising items should not be inserted during a departmental programme. The department is also conscious of the needs of the country women and it has three women extension officers and programmes of the Agricultural bureau frequently include special sessions for women. •

Every farmer in the State, who cares to request it, may receive a free copy of the department's monthly journal, the “Agricultural Gazette,” of which about 37.000 copies are sent out. Another 18,000 to 20,000 receive “Dairy Topics,” a two-monthly publication for dairy farmers, and every commercial poultry farmer in the State, numbering about 6000 or 7000, receive “Poultry Notes" each month.

In a single year the department has received requests for the issue of up to 1,125,000 copies of its 300-odd tree publications. Some 200 new publications or revised publications are written annually.

The majority of the department’s extension workers are holders of diplomas from the department’s agricultural colleges at either Wagga Wagga or Hawkesbury. The State’s universities are, however, showing increasing interest in producing degreed extension workers and the likely trend is for more extension workers to have degrees. As in New Zealand there is also a movement in New

South Wales to provide farmers and graziers with more intimate advisory services. A few advisory groups are already operating. Two members of the staff of the School of Wool Technology of the University of New South Wales—one of them from New Zealand—are working with a group of about 12 farmers in the Orange district on the central tablelands about 150 miles west of Sydney. The men are Mr J. D. McFarlane, lecturer in agronomy, and Mr C. L. Goldstone, lecturer in livestock production. Mr Goldstone, who is from Auckland, first came to Australia in 1936 but subsequently returned to spend four years on the staff of Massey. College. The two men visit members of their farm management study group in Orange four times a year and will be shortly producing figures for the first year. Members of the group make a donation to the university funds. Mr McFarlane said it was hoped that the experience would be beneficial to the farmers and to the university. As part of its extension work the School of Wool Technology also conducts an annual short course of a week’s duration which is attended by 80 to 120 farmers and graziers who may live

on the campus if they wish, and the university also cooperates with the Department of Agriculture and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and extension workers of commercial firms in farm schools and lecture panels organised by the Agricultural Bureau.

An associate -professor of farm management has just been appointed to the staff of the school and from next year “extension” will be an optional course in the institution.